Arthur Erickson Memorial Award 2025: Laura Killam Architecture -

Architectural Photos by Andrew Latreille; Portraits by Pooya Nabei

When architect Laura Killam starts iterating on a design in a remote location, there will be the expected challenges she needs to consider: the natural materials best suited to the site, the complex topography and where best to site the home, the need to design limited concrete foundations due to the weight of that material and the resulting difficulty in transporting it. But for Killam, it’s as much about these practical requirements as it is about more poetic needs: when the homeowner approaches the place, how will they arrive from the beach? Which forested trail needs to wind its way to which doorway in the home?

The Beach House

Those careful considerations have culminated in the stunning portfolio of work from this year’s winner of our Arthur Erickson Memorial Award for an emerging architect. Thoughtful, 360-degree designs that had judge Heather Dubbeldam of Dubbeldam Architecture and Design enthuse, “This is an emerging practice that is deeply attuned to site and atmosphere, offering a fresh and resonant voice in Canadian architecture.”

Killam opened her architecture practice in 2017, though she traversed her own winding, though perhaps not always forested, route to get there. “If I’d listened to my nine-year-old self, I would have gotten into architecture right away,” she says with a laugh. Her mother is renowned artist Sherry Killam, and her father Larry is a developer who was central in revitalizing Vancouver’s Gastown—art and architecture were predominant tenets in her childhood.

She studied fine arts at Concordia, and worked for eight years as a set decorator on film productions, but always felt there was something “unfinished” in her career and education. And so, at the age of 30, she went back to school for her master’s in architecture at Yale, with summer gigs at local iconic firms Patkau Architects (this year’s Design Icons) and AldrichPears.

Low-Impact Living: In addition to finding the perfect siting for Home for an Artist (above), Killam creates big magic in the design, too—work that judge Jordan Rice of Omar Gandhi Architects applauds for its “rich textures and materials aging gracefully over time, revealing a story about place.” The Armadillo rug is from Provide; appliances are from Midland Appliance.

One of her professors was the inimitable Frank Gehry, who invited her to work with his firm once she’d graduated. “It couldn’t be more different from what I’m doing now,” she says. But it’s where she honed her skills about iterating and thinking through a design with dozens and dozens of physical models and hand drawings, a process that’s as central to her practice now as it is to his. And, like her experience in film, her time with Gehry informed how she thinks about storytelling in architecture. “I really became enchanted with how the spaces we surround ourselves with are a reflection of our character.”

Killam’s first project—a guest cabin and an artist’s studio on an off-the-grid island in B.C.’s Desolation Sound—would lead to somewhat of a specialty for the firm: remote projects on wild sites. And while she’s primarily a residential designer, she has projects in the works in Ucluelet for a bed and breakfast with a spa and a thermal circuit, and has her sights set on building wellness retreats, island restaurants and field schools in wilderness settings.

Natural Beauties
There’s a seamless transition between indoors and out in the Ranch Outpost (above), reflected in the careful choice of materials: clad in rough sawn cedar boards left to silver, the home features the same boards inside, stained a natural weathered grey. The bathroom in the Writer’s Retreat (below) features a pebble floor tile from Daltile, Newport Brass fixtures from Cantu and soapstone counters from Margranite.

Writer’s Retreat

Regular readers of Western Living will no doubt be already familiar with Killam’s off-the-grid work: a project known as “the Ranch Outpost” appeared in our March/April issue last year. Designed for a family that had spent the previous summer camping on the property, it features social spaces that seamlessly transition indoors and out, with a design meant to embrace a summer spent predominantly outside. Each bedroom, for example, is accessed through its own door from the outside—no internal hallways or connections—and the shower and bath are also in the great outdoors, offering a true immersion in nature that’s a benefit from its wild location. Killam balances these private moments with social spaces meant to naturally bring people together, indoors or out. Notes judge Matt McLeod of McLeod Bovell: “Even when sited as solitary buildings, it is easy to imagine that these simple, well-articulated forms could aggregate into convivial groupings, forming the same kind of relaxed but meaningful connections with each other that they share with the landscape.”

Home for an Artist.

The ease with which each project rests on its wild site—Writer’s Retreat, positioned on a hilltop to take in both late afternoon summer sun and winter storm watching; Home for an Artist, set at the edge of both a meadow and a sandy beach—belies the effort that Killam takes to truly understand both the needs of the homeowners and the innate charms of the property itself. “So often we get a site like the Ranch, which was a totally wild site—it was actually impenetrable when we first got there,” says Killam. “We had to take the time to know the site, to read the site and respond to it, and to figure out where the building should be situated in there to find the opportunities there. I love that stage of design, where you don’t even know what the architecture is yet.”

Laura Killam. Photo by Pooya Nabei

Q&A: Laura Killam on Design

What was your first design project?

My first project was a small cabin addition for a friend, followed by my Home for an Artist project, which included a small cabin and an artist studio accessed by a boardwalk.

Was there a childhood moment that hinted design was in your future?

I insisted on taking a carpentry course when I was nine because I wanted to build homes!

What are your design pet peeves?

The use of too many materials and discordant formal moves—and insensitivity to the site. By contrast, restraint, simplicity and a refined material palette always win in my books.